Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with sesame oil?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with sesame oil most disproportionately are sesame seed (×15.6 chance, n=652), chinese cabbage (×15.5 chance, n=77), soybean (×11.4 chance, n=392), shiitake (×11.1 chance, n=192), seaweed (×10.6 chance, n=66), soy sauce (×10.6 chance, n=1307), peanut oil (×10.6 chance, n=111) and enokidake (×10.4 chance, n=32). The score behind the ranking is positive pointwise mutual information — how many times more often a pair shares a recipe than random combination would predict — and n is the number of recipes containing both ingredients. Nothing is published below a floor of 20 recipes per pair and 100 per ingredient. Co-occurrence records what recipe authors actually do — it conflates deliciousness with popularity and tradition — so read it as ethnography, not judgment.
The measured partners — PPMI · ×chance · n
- sesame seed — PPMI 2.75 · ×15.6 chance · n=652 (sesame seed itself appears in 1,442 recipes)
- chinese cabbage — PPMI 2.74 · ×15.5 chance · n=77 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
- soybean — PPMI 2.43 · ×11.4 chance · n=392 (soybean itself appears in 1,192 recipes)
- shiitake — PPMI 2.41 · ×11.1 chance · n=192 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
- seaweed — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=66 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
- soy sauce — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=1307 (soy sauce itself appears in 4,263 recipes)
- peanut oil — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=111 (peanut oil itself appears in 363 recipes)
- enokidake — PPMI 2.35 · ×10.4 chance · n=32 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use sesame oil with one of its measured partners:
- Lo Mein (捞面) — with soybean, shiitake, soy sauce
- Bibimbap (비빔밥) — with sesame seed, shiitake, soy sauce
- Japchae (잡채) — with sesame seed, shiitake, soy sauce
- Ssamjang (쌈장) — with sesame seed, soybean, soy sauce
- Chinese Chicken Salad With Sesame Peanut Vinaigrette — with sesame seed, soy sauce, peanut oil
- Korean Steamed Clams Appetizer — with sesame seed, soybean, soy sauce
How this was measured
sesame oil appears in 1,843 of the 63,696 recipes counted (5,296 parsed + 1,081 hand-curated + 57,319 from the dataset published with Ahn et al., 2011). PPMI = max(0, ln(count(A,B)·N / (count(A)·count(B)))), all counts over the same N; lift = e^PMI, which reads directly as "×chance." Staples (salt, sugar, flour, water) are excluded because sources under-record them, and pairs where one name contains the other are excluded as near-duplicates.
Read the numbers with their limits: the corpus is Western-skewed (90% of it is the largely North American and European recipe dataset published with Ahn et al.'s 2011 paper), so the absence of a pairing here proves nothing except who wrote the recipes down. PPMI favors the rare end even above the floor — a niche pair at n=22 can outrank a workhorse pair seen thousands of times, because common ingredients' huge counts divide the score down — so read PPMI and n together.
The full reference — 150 ingredients, top 8 partners each — lives at What actually goes with X.
Curious how these flavors fit your palate — take the short taste test →
Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.